Black Laughter
by Holl-e-wood
Summary: one shot. When Sirius Black was arrested, they say he just stood there and laughedbut why? Set during Sirius' first night in Azkaban, this fic attempts to explain.


Black Laughter

_It would appear that amidst their twisted facts, Stan Shunpike and Ernie Prang were right about something:_

"_Anyway, they cornered Black in the middle of a street full of Muggles an' Black took out 'is wand and 'e blasted 'alf the street apart, an' a wizard got it, an' so did a dozen Muggles what got in the way. 'Orrible, eh? An' you know what Black did then?" Stan continued in a dramatic whisper. "What?" said Harry. "Laughed," said Stan. 'Jus' stood there an' laughed. An' when reinforcements from the Ministry of Magic got there, 'e went wiv 'em quiet as anyfink, still laughin 'is 'ead off. 'Cos 'e's mad, inee, Ern? Inee mad?" "If he weren't when he went to Azkaban, he will be now," said Ern…_

_This story was inspired by this poem by John Keats:_

"_Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell:_

_No God, no Demon of severe response_

_Deigns to reply from Heaven or from Hell._

_Then to my human heart I turn at once—_

_Heart! thou and I are here sad and alone;_

_Say, wherefore did I laugh! O mortal pain!_

_O Darkness! Darkness! ever must I moan,_

_To question Heaven and Hell and Heart in vain._

_Why did I laugh? I know this being's lease_

_My fancy to its utmost blisses spreads;_

_Yet could I on this very midnight cease,_

_And the world's gaudy ensigns see in shreds._

_Verse, Fame and Beauty are intense indeed,_

_But Death intenser—Death is Life's high meed."_

_Note: All quotations taken from the first American hardback editions, _Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, _and_ Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. _All credit goes to J.K. Rowling; this is just fan fiction, after all, and for my own personal non-profit enjoyment._

Chapter One: Black Laughter

Time: The first night

Place: Maximum security cell, Azkaban Fortress

The echo of that slamming door had been reverberating in his mind for the last hour.

So final. So irrevocable.

They meant him to die here.

Although, in truth, it might have been longer than an hour—he had no way of knowing. What he was aware of, constantly, was the dark, and the damp, and the coldness that had settled in his chest. The sheer oppressive weight, the overhanging claustrophobic intensity of the stone walls around him, settled in his churning mind like a dead weight, dragging him down, further, deeper, into the roiling waves of his own consciousness. He struggled for clarity of thought, like a drowning man desperately attempting to keep his head above water. He knew this outward veneer of sanity, sitting there so calmly, hands folded, eyes on the floor, would shatter like fragile glass, much too easily, if he could not stay in control. And his control was slipping. Control meant continuing this never-ending, exhausting, mental struggle… and he was so very, very tired…

And now, he was no longer sure what he was continuing his struggle _for…_

That emptiness gnawed at him, the subtle feeling of misplaced thought jarring him again and again with renewed intensity, and he pushed away again the dark thoughts that threatened to overwhelm him and focused on that emptiness instead, that one sign of all he had forgotten.

The ache inside tore at his heart, but he refused to give up. He latched onto the pain it caused him to be aware of that emptiness like a lifeline, a shield against the thoughts and memories he _did_ have, the ones he would rather _not_ think of.

Hours passed. It grew steadily darker outside, but the man did not notice, sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest and his face turned down, eyes closed, a grimace set into his features as he cradled his head in his hands, digging his fingers into his hair as though to anchor himself to sanity.

The chill in the air deepened, and he shuddered.

It would not be long now.

As his thoughts chased each other in pointless circles, his energy waned; his resistance began to fail; his defenses crumbled, and his tormentors circled ever nearer, outside the locked door, and the man did not have to look up or even open his eyes to know that they were extra vigilant now.

He deliberately took a deep breath, holding it for as long as possible before exhaling deeply. He tried to make it smooth, but it came out shaky, as though he also tried to hold back a sob; but his eyes were dry.

The man tilted his head back and tried again, as felt the wave of darkness threatening to overwhelm him, desperate thoughts of terror and crises long past struggling with his calming breathing, deliberate awareness of the cold, damp floor, the biting chill in the air, the fetid stink of human sweat and excrement, the cold-induced numbness in the tips of his fingers and toes…

The tormentors receded, disappointed; he was not quite ready to crack, to give in to the inevitable… not quite yet…

A grim smile cracked the man's lips.

The tormentors swooped back, crowding the door and the bars more closely, and the man collapsed with a moan, the one brief moment of dark elation at a small victory snatched away… the irony of his failure, of the trap he had fallen into while trying so hard to avoid it, washed over him, as he lay curled in a ball, gasping, as the last defense broke and his sanity was submerged in wave after wave of the terrors that had lain hidden in the dark depths and recesses of his own mind. They all came swirling up now from the deep of his subconscious, and he was a man drowning, washed beneath a wave of dark despair, unable to resurface.

Memories deluged him. Violence, hatred, fear, and anger, home life and family mixed in together with friends and school and enemies, and every dark thought he had ever entertained, however briefly, was recalled to the surface with surprising force and shocking clarity, pulled to the surface of his thoughts, sucked up from all the secret places he never went inside his own mind by the rattling, sickly sounding inhaling of breath of his tormentors, who stood waiting, glorying in his misery, just outside the door….

But then, one memory, stronger than the others, the most painful of all, the freshest and most sharp, the one he would have sold his soul to prevent from being a memory at all…

_It was a few days ago, and he knew with a certain, aching certainty that he was too late, that he had been wrong, and that it was all his fault, he was to blame, he had opened the door for Death, and Death had come, and left a ruins of what had once been a house, two dead bodies and a crying baby… and now he was retreating in terror from the glowering skull and snake symbol that shone in dark triumph against the sky, blocking out the stars…_

He was crying now, huddled limply against the filthy floor, weeping hot tears of anger and fear and shame and dread—dread, because he although he could feel the tormentors slowly dispersing, could almost taste their revolting satisfaction as they retreated farther back, to where they could reach their other victims as well, he knew what memory was coming next, and was powerless to stop it…

"_Lily and James, Sirius! How could you!"_

_Peter's voice was broken, but there was a malicious gleam in his beady eyes. Already half mad, Sirius felt something inside snap, catapulting him over the edge of reason and into the shadowy recesses of rage beyond. He launched himself forward, hands grabbing desperately for his wand, snarling incoherent threats and half-garbled curses—but the words weren't enough, and he was too slow, and Wormtail's wand was already flashing—and then the explosion came._

_He was blown aside, lost, momentarily blind and deaf. Before the smoke had cleared he knew there were bodies around him, but he was oblivious to the screams, aware only of the great rushing sense of dread and anger that opened up inside him like a pit of hell, threatening to engulf him, to swallow him whole…_

_Hit wizards were aparating, surrounding him, but the full force of his thought and his hate-filled gaze were locked on the point where the rat had vanished, fixing forever in his mind the cruel smile this once-friend had given him, and the desire for revenge shook him so strongly he was oblivious to the demands of those intent on capturing him, on performing damage control…_

_Capturing _him_…_

_The irony was too great to bear, as the image of that ruined house and vile skull and snake flashed through his mind again, and the yawning chasm inside him swallowed him whole with his grief, turning his anger to a pain so sharp he couldn't breathe, as he dropped his wand from his hand and stumbled backwards, his urge to revenge suddenly a heavy, leaden despairing cry out to the only two people who could help, who were gone now…_

_His head snapped up, his eyes opened wide, and he felt an insane smile curling the edges of his mouth. They were gone, everything was gone, and he was going to be punished for it…_

_He opened his mouth to scream, could feel the pressure of unshed tears built up behind his eyes, but instead…_

_Instead, the laughter came._

_At first it was distant and detached, sounding nothing like him, and he wasn't quite aware that the bizarre sound was issuing form his own throat—but it deepened, and he laughed only with deep pain, a physical ache around his heart, an ache to match the leaden feeling in his gut…_

_And he laughed, for James, for Lily, and for baby Harry, for Remus, for Dumbledore and for himself, as the Hit Wizards spelled him into submission, making sure he couldn't apparate away, and snapped his wand in half, and he was still laughing when they brought him to Azkaban and chucked in him the maximum security cell, surrounded by the dementors, and he laughed until the door slammed shut, and that echo cut him off abruptly and the full demon power of the dementors began its cruel work upon him._

He came back to the present to the sound of his laughter echoing again around the hollow chamber, shrill, aching, unstable, and mad, and he went on laughing, as the chill grew deeper and the night set in for real; no moonlight found its way down into his grimy prison, but even if it had, the prisoner would have been oblivious, locked in his own head by the power of the dementors, trapped in a never-ending echoing circular thought pattern of laughter that released the pain and brought him more, that was the only possible response to the sudden madness of the world around him and the only fitting tribute to the fickle fate which had cost him everything…

He would die here, rot away in the stinking, fetid cell, he knew it in the bottom of his heart, as surely as he knew that the moment the laughter stopped his mind would again be able to focus only on the dark evil the dementors allowed him to think and feel. But for the moment, his laughter rang out into the night with the force of the last sane man in a world of terrorizing craziness, echoes rebounding off the walls and each other, and he couldn't stop it, didn't want to stop it, because it was the only way he knew how to survive, and he knew he had to survive, because Peter did… and as long as Peter survived, he had to, in order to have the smallest chance of repaying deed for deed the horrors the rat had wreaked on others…

And so Sirius Black laughed, and laughed, until his voice gave out and he lost consciousness, drug down into the hell of his own mind by the force of a black destiny in which he, like so many others, was only the merest pawn.


End file.
